Micah Taylor » Music

February song

Micah — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:30:24 +0000

Still playing out a ton but not getting anything new out. Here is a tune from Nate Houge with me on mando and background vocals when we played the Victory Muse. Recorded by Joel Paken and mixed by Russel Munson.

January song

Micah — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:07:21 +0000

Back the Road by Trace

I have been playing out a ton in the month of January. So no new song but a live recording from a Trace reunion show at the Victory Muse. I spent many a year in the Twin Cities folk band Trace and have many fond memories. Blaine and Leah Howard as well as Russel Munson have been big influences in my life. This was a fun night and was captured well by Joel Paken and mixed by Russel. Enjoy!

December song

Micah — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:35:08 +0000

Hot Cake

This tune needs a little prefacing. In November I was playing my regular 3rd-Friday-night coffeehouse gig by myself. Normally, I can hide behind Nate Houge but he was out of town so I was flying solo. Much to my surprise my friend, and former Trace band mate, Russel Munson showed up. We were chatting about how his rock band Live in Japan is on hiatus and that he’s doing some recording but it’s all quite folk music. I mentioned how my recording gear was out of commission but that I still needed to record a new tune. The next day Russel gave me a list of available dates and the best one that worked was my birthday, Friday, Dec 19th.

I decided that I would not write some quiet folk tune (as is my normal inclination) and write a tune for Russel to rock out on. So, I listened to lots of Weezer, Jet, AC/DC, ZZ Top, Led Zepplin, etc, and the night before our recording session I sat down and wrote the tune. I had also just watched Talladega Nights and I think Will Ferrell might have been a character influence in the song.

I showed up at Russel’s at about 9:30 AM and after we laughed for a while we decided to really record the song. Russel and I both agreed that if I was going to go to a musical place I don’t often go, then we should go all out. 3 chords, under 3 minutes long, lots of vocal straining, feedback, distortion, finger-tapping solo, and even grunt-like-gutteral noises. So I broke out my favorite (yet rarely used) pedal, the Hot Cake, grabbed the hollow body electric (best for feedback), plugged into the Fender the tube amp, turned everything up, and did a scratch reference track. We put mics on Russel’s drums and he played it through a couple of times and did a great take the second time through. I grabbed the electric again, through down some sweet rock guitar and then stumbled my way through a rock solo. I don’t think I’ve finger-tapped since 1989. Then I did a quick bass track and sang the vocal a few times as I can only growl like that for a short period. We then did a real basic quick and dirty mix and I was out the door by 4 PM. What a blast! Russel, as always, was so much fun to work with and I will definitely use him again.

Enjoy the song… I know I do.

October Song

Micah — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:00:19 +0000

The next recorded song in my effort to rekindle my songwriting.

Give a little of yourself
give a little of yourself

About the song:

Back when I was training for the Twin Cities 10 mile (yes, I know, it’s hard for me to believe too) I would run by this beautiful house with a huge cedar fence. I never noticed it until the sweet smell of cedar caught my attention and made me forget that I was pretending to be a runner who was in shape. I, in fact, am not a runner and not in shape. Well, okay, I am in a round shape… back to the song.

I loved that fence. It was huge and kept anyone from looking in or out. But then I began to think of why I’d want a fence like that and realized that it was just another way to keep much needed communities and interaction with people at a distance. We need to commune even though we don’t want people. We need communities to come around us when we struggle and when we celebrate. I want my kids to grow up in communities and be influenced by diversity first hand not tv-screen-hand. So the “baby” referred to in the song is my kiddo.

How it got recorded (audio/computer nerd alert):

Since the family has been expanding in our tiny house, space has been an issue. It’s also difficult with limited time to spend much of it setting up and tearing down to record. So I thought I’d be smart and set up my Mac G4 tower and my Pro Tools rig in a location somewhat tucked away and use my MacBook to VNC into it and quickly recorded where ever in the house. I had 2 evenings and 1 afternoon (live drums don’t work so well at night) set aside to record and spent most of it trying to figure out why I couldn’t get my MacBook to connect to my G4.

Since I recorded last month’s demo on my MacBook with GarageBand and pretty much hated the GarageBand experience, I cracked open my Windows XP lappy and gave Reaper, an open-source DAW (http://www.cockos.com/reaper/), an chance. I love it. Much famed Audacity has a lot to learn from Reaper. Sadly, I did not have a decent USB I/O so i recorded with the laptop computer mic. And since my time was wasted trying to setup my Pro Tools rig, I had only a few hours to record the tune, which I’ve maybe played twice before, on a new DAW that I’ve never used . Awesome!

So I fired Reaper up, grabbed the acoustic, played through it once into the computer mic, made a new track, sang into the computer mic. I did sing 2 passes but just used the 2nd pass. Then I grabbed a DI and, through a series of adaptors, plugged into the 1/8-inch mic input and played a bass part and 2 quick electric parts. The electric guitars were recorded clean and then I used the baked-in amp model plugins in Reaper. Then I went down into the basement, set the laptop on the stairs, hit record and sat down at the drums. I’m not that great of a drummer and also had no idea how the loud drums would do with the laptop mic. Thankfully the computer mic has some sort of built in limiter and it seemed to work fine and I played pretty good for being unbelievably out of practice. I then did a quick mix with Reaper included plugins as well as some free VST plugins I’ve gathered from http://www.kvraudio.com/ and there you have it. I decided not to do any mastering as the levels were really hot and already limited to the max by the laptop computer mic.

In spite of not having a good I/O and the computer noise being recorded over and over with each take, I am pretty happy with the demo. I am also a new fan of Reaper. It will definitely stay a tool in my recording kit and may even be my go to DAW if I can work out some of the latency issues (which I blame on the laptop sound card) and some of the editing and multi-take issues. But that’s the beauty of it being opensource, I (or someone in the community) can do something about it.

Enjoy the tune and let me know what you think.

September song

Micah — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:59:08 +0000

lullabye

As promised in a previous post I have recorded one of the songs I’ve written from the month of September. Simply titled Lullaby(e). I “penned” this repetitive tune whilst in the rocking chair of my son’s room at 2 AM trying to get him back to sleep. What keeps drawing me back to this tune is while I was singing it I had to transition from 3/4 to 4/4 and back. It only sounded “right” when I did that and I’ve never heard a kids song do that yet. Maybe I’m on to something. Enjoy!

Quick update: This was my first time doing a quick and dirty demo with GarageBand. I used the computer mic and mic mixed and mastered with it. It sounds like poo! A craftsman never blames his tool… but a musician blames his computer. I will hopefully have my Pro Tools rig back up soon.

Ryan Adams told me I wasn’t a songwriter.

Micah — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:38:37 +0000

Ryan Adams (one of my favorite songwriters) told me I wasn’t a songwriter. Okay not directly to me, and really, he conveyed that to me through a lifehacker.com article by Brad Issac who saw Adams on tv. Adams said in response to a question, (Issac’s paraphrase) “What I do and what all musicians do is easy. All we have to do is sit down for a couple hours a week and write a song or two. That simple task is all the world asks of me, so I do it. The other musicians who don’t are just lazy, because again, we aren’t being asked to tar rooftops or clean out dumpsters. We just have to write a couple songs!” Ryan Adams is right.

In December of 2006 I released a full length album. I haven’t written a song since that album was in production. I also claim to be a hobbyist photographer and I’m lucky if I take one picture a week. If I am defined by what I do, then I am a web developer and a family man and I’m proud of it. The problem is I tell people that I’m a musician who records, writes songs, and plays out and I don’t… or at least I haven’t. Brad Issac summed it up in the aforementioned article by saying, “…if you don’t take the simple action, then you cease to be. A song writer who doesn’t write songs ceases to be a song writer. An author who doesn’t write ceases to be an author. A non-smoker who doesn’t keep cigarettes out of his mouth ceases to be a non-smoker.”

I don’t want to cease to be what I claim to be. So I am doing something about it. I plan to take and upload at least a picture a day, write at least a song a week, record at least a song a month, and play out in public at least once every other month. Then I can say proudly I am as I describe myself… “web developer by day… musician by night… mild mannered photographer somewhere in between.”

If Jesus was a rock star he sure wouldn’t get put on the radio

Micah — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:49:42 +0000

Welaware played a city picnic recently and man did we melt people’s faces off with summertime rock n’ roll. We hadn’t played in a while, which isn’t always a bad thing. Songs were new again. And since Nate let his 4-year-old daughter pick the set list many of the songs were new again for the first time. But Justin and I straped on out thinking boots (like Matt Marohl) and got to rocking.

The highlight for me was the large turn out of (what I assume are) homeless folks. They were a blast. One guy, with just one tooth, kept raving how great we were. Another guy (a Kenny Rogers look a like) told me I was the best drummer he ever saw… and no, he wasn’t drunk. But my favorite one was a lady (I’ll call her wolf shirt) couldn’t stop dancing and always yelled for more at the end of every song. But the best part about wolfie was she would grab people from the audience and get them to dance with her. At one point she had about 15 high school kids dancing with her and later 5, or so, elderly folks. I’ll admit I was slightly uncomfortable when she started doing Uma-Thurman-like moves in our very close proximity, but all in all it was awesome to have folks generally loving us and our music. I think Welaware has discovered our target audience.

Spring brings pedals

Micah — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:44:41 +0000

Springtime is for lovers and I am in love. Sure with my wife, child, and Creator but now I’m adding guitar pedals to the list. Being a predominantly acoustic player I rarely get a chance to use effect pedals except when I tune my guitar. However, on a Friday afternoon I found myself in the studio and inspired. I am working on a mix for a full band Jonathan Rundman song and he gave me carte blanc to add some tracks. At first I went down my obvious road of mandolin and I got slightly risky with a wierd motorized harmonium thing that a buddy gave me.

But then Jonathan left an email asking me to incorporate “some of those boops and beeps sounds” I got when Welaware backed him up at one of his gigs (at aforementioned gig, I had brought my laptop as Jonathan’s drummer Troy was playing the skins and is a much better drummer than I am). So I began exploring what boops and beeps were needed for the JR the tune. I didn’t have the same plugin I had used before so I dug up some samples and turned to one of the greatest effects pedals ever made… the Line6 DL4.

I started with a turntable scratch sample (which you can hear at the beginning or the upcoming mp3) and ran it through the pedals and ended up with one of the most entrancing things I think I’ve ever created.

Listen for yourself. The first thing you hear is the turntable scratch sample slightly effected then, after a slight pause, you hear the end result.

Record Scratch Line6 effect

Man, I could listen to that cricket-like sound at the end for days. I think I actually get a little sad when it stops. Move over folk I’m headed to trance music.

Free Jonathan Rundman mp3!

Micah — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:49:37 +0000

I’ve been working with Jonathan Rundman updating his mailing delivery list to avoid the treacherous spam filled waters using PHPlist. He was nice enough to ask me to mix a couple of his tunes. The first of which he released as a free download on his site. Go grab it for yourself. And if you haven’t heard his album Public Library then buy it today… seriously it’s one of the few albums my wife and I both love… and that’s saying something.

How music videos should be.

Micah — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:22:10 +0000

I remember being in middle school and dreaming up band names with my good friend Brent. We were both guitar players and could pull out some sweet Skid Row and Motley Crue (sorry no umlaut) licks and I could screech our some glam-rock high pitched vocals whenever the ladies were around.

Eventually our imaginary band (I think we settled on Aqua Net) of course made it onto MTV and our video was grand. Due to the amount of lady-fans we had to take to the trees and perform our latest smash single – Stick To Me – whilst suspended among the California redwoods. AWESOME!

Well MTV has changed, it’s been a long time since the Headbangers Ball and I’m not sure I’d even watch it now anyway. My glam days turned to folk days and my idea of what is cool has (thankfully) changed significantly. Less Poision and White Lion and more Ray LaMontagne and Vigilantes of Love.

Today I stumbled across a video on a design website. I wish I saw on MTV but since it has nothing to do with someone turing sixteen or Flavor-Flav finding a wife I don’t think it will ever make it on “music television”… and that’s not really a bad thing.

This is what I think music videos should look like. Oh and on a side note, this is also a decent study on reverb and how spaces should sound.

Fionn Regan – this guy is new to me but I like him. More good stuff on www.myspace.com/fionnregan